Freedom from the pain of wanting
True freedom comes not from eliminating desire, but from allowing yourself to want without needing it to be resolved.
In many ways, my personal growth for the past few years has been about my relationship with desire—wanting.
I’ve learned that wanting can hurt. And what humans want more than anything is to end the hurt of wanting and, paradoxically, that hurts even more.
To get away from wanting, many of us wrestle with the world to try to get what we want in order to reduce want. That is wanting what we want.
Or, sometimes, we wrestle with ourselves to try to reduce the wanting by telling ourselves not to want. That is wanting not to want.
Either way, wanting tries to cure itself of wanting by wanting.
Ha!!
Wanting is neither wrong nor not wrong. It just is.
So Buddha offered the First Noble Truth:
Life Can Hurt.
If you can accept that life hurts sometimes, then you don’t have to fix wanting. You can just let wanting hurt.
Then, you don’t have to struggle to get what you want and you don’t have to struggle not to want what you want. You can just want.
Be able to bear the pain of wanting and so not having to fix wanting is freedom from wanting. It is also true freedom to choose your path.
Freedom from wanting is the only real freedom.
How to Be Free from Wanting
Sometimes I want something from the world or from a person or from an organization.
The wanting can be agonizing. Then, I want the wanting to go away.
As long as I struggle to eliminate what is already here–the wanting–I will suffer. You cannot un-want once wanting arises.
That’s why wanting not to want hurts even more than wanting!
So, to be free from wanting, my trick is not to struggle with wanting.
Here is the best tool I know for not struggling with wanting:
Pray or chant or wish for the well-being of the person, organization or world that you hope will give you what you want.
Everytime the wanting arises, neither chase it nor fight it but replace it with your well-wishes or prayers or chants.
You might say, “That’s all very well but what about me? Who is going to wish well for me?”
You don’t have to only wish or chant or pray for the person, organization or world.
You can wish or pray or chant for all of us. For yourself and everything else.
Pray that everything turns out the best for all of us.
And then believe that it will.
A Reflection for You
Where in your life are you struggling with wanting?
What might shift if you stopped trying to fix the wanting and instead blessed it?
👉 Leave a comment or hit reply. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Love,
Colin
PS. Did my post make you feel something new?
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